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They broke their usual frugal routine to offer £111m for the Ecuadorian, who had cost Brighton & Hove Albion £4.5m just two years earlier, but ended up losing out to Chelsea.

FSG has long relied on data and sound recruitment to mitigate risk in the transfer market, and a refocusing of that appears to be happening right now with the view to adding another club to help discover and nurture talent that could eventually thrive at Liverpool, or be sold for a handsome profit.

There are obvious links as to a potential market already, with the FSG set to appoint Benfica technical director Pedro Marques as part of the plans, while Liverpool continues to be linked with Ruben Amorim, boss of Sporting CP, as its choice for the man to replace Klopp.

But where might FSG choose, and what benefits and drawbacks are there in certain markets?

As global football club management and investment strategy consultant for Twenty First Group, a former owner of Danish side Helsingor, and investor in clubs including Dundalk and Swansea City, US football investor Jordan Gardner is well versed in the pros and cons of the MCO model and believes that FSG has plenty of compelling opportunities.

Speaking to the ECHO, Gardner said: “If you're FSG, where an academy talent through Liverpool's academy might never touch the first team but goes to a club in Portugal, produces and is sold just out of that part of that club, it is beneficial.

“I think a lot of this discussion comes out of a little bit of an outdated view of the loan system.

“Sophisticated football folks like Michael Edwards, they're presumably saying to themselves, ‘We want to be able to control the development of this player’.

Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez are two players to have trodden that particular path.

“I think that Portugal is obviously the easy choice,” said Gardner.

“I think with that pipeline of talent and the easy access to work permits for players from Brazil, it make makes Portugal an obvious choice.

“I think the downside with Portugal is outside the top three to four clubs, which you're not going to be able to buy, the infrastructure is quite poor at those clubs.

I don't think people realise how small and poor the infrastructure is at a lot of those clubs.

“I think you're looking at potentially more CapEx investment if that's what the clubs are going to go into.

“As much as it's very unclear to me the data points on success at the moment for Chelsea, I do like what they did at Strasbourg.

“I think the problem is if you go to a Belgium or Holland or some of these clubs that are lower down in Portugal, the environment and the level of play is quite far from where you want it to be for that player to develop.

If they're their motivations are that they really want to have a good solid landing spot for an academy player, well, maybe they should link up with a league style play-wise that's maybe similar to the Premier League, maybe Belgium, potentially.

“I think a lot of it's kind of working backward and figuring out which leagues and particular clubs, obviously because every club is created differently, which philosophically fits into why they want to do this.”

One market that Gardner feels may be the source of untapped potential is in Asia, particularly Japan.

One of Liverpool’s success stories this campaign has been that of Japan skipper Wataru Endo, a summer arrival from VfB Stuttgart who was signed in the aftermath of the Caicedo deal collapse.

Japanese players such as Endo, Brighton’s Kaoru Mitoma, and Arsenal’s Takehiro Tomiyasu have all thrived in the Premier League, and that having a foothold in that market could pay dividends.

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